We’re past halfway through 2011, and so far, we’ve had Thor and the last HP installment among the more successful releases. Transformer may be a commercial behemoth but that doesn’t make it a success in my book.

I digress. We still have a long way to go for 2011. And if the past is any indication, Hollywood still has a few games up its sleeves. So here’s a lineup of what I will be looking forward to in theaters these coming months:

The Plot: Sickly Steve Rogers after being deemed unfit for military service, volunteers for a top secret research project. The experiment, which enhances the peak of human perfection, aims to aid the US war efforts in the 40s. The result is Captain America, dedicated to defending America’s ideals.

Chris Evans, who you might remember as Johnny Storm/Human Torch from the Fantastic Four franchise, plays the lead role of Steve Rogers/Captain America. He does look the part and from the trailers, I think he might just be a good choice after all, regardless of the confusion playing two characters in the Marvel universe creates.

On a side note, the merchandise tie-up for this movie is already in full swing. From fast food to novelty items, you’ll see Evans’ mug as Captain A. at every turn. Collectibles maker Hot Toys already had preorders open for the official 1/6th figure.

Plot: A married guy (Bateman) switches body with his best friend (Reynolds) in the hopes of wooing his co-worker.

Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern was a let-down. But that’s due mainly to a craptastic movie plot to begin with made worse by less than decent film effects, namely, awful CG animation. Jason Bateman you’ll remember is the guy who helps out Will Smith in Hancock.

I’m putting this here because it’s a comedy. I’m hoping a good comedy movie. One that ACTUALLY makes the audience laugh.

The Plot: The movie follows Puss and his adventures as a back story before he meets the guys from Shrek.

Antonio Banderas reprises his role as Puss. Trailers for the film are already being played in theaters, but it’s still a long way to go before the release. November 4th is the US release date, so expect a few weeks delay before it hits local theaters. I couldn’t find specific dates for its Philippine release.

The Plot: Greek warrior Theseus battles it out against power-mad King Hyperion who is bent on freeing the imprisoned Titans to reign chaos and destruction on both the Olympians and the entire humanity.

Henry Cavill plays the hero Theseus in this epic movie. If you don’t know who Cavill is, you might be interested to know that he’s the guy pegged to play Clark Kent/Superman in Man of Steel, set for release in 2013. Does he have what it takes? Still have my fingers crossed.

Plot: A story set in the near future where humanoid robot boxing is a popular sport. It follows a struggling promoter who, with his newly-discovered 11-year old son who wants to know his father, may have found a champion in a seemingly unlikely robot.

How to set a program to always run as administrator in Windows 7:

Right-click on the target program’s shortcut icon. For programs pinned to the taskbar, you’ll have to right-click on the icon, and then do another right-click on the program’s name, the one just above the “Unpin this program from taskbar” menu item at the bottom.

Choose Properties.

The Properties dialog appears, with the Shortcut tab in focus. Click on the “Advanced…” button.

Another dialog box will appear. Just tick the box for “Run as administrator,” click OK twice, and you’re ready to go.

You can also use the Compatibility tab to accomplish this. On the same Properties dialog, switch to the Compatibility tab, and put a tick on “Run this program as an administrator” under the “Privilege Level.” Click OK and you’re all set.

You’ll still be prompted with the UAC if you have it enabled, and you should. Finally, only do this if you trust the program.

How to set Google Chrome to always give you search results in English:

Google Chrome is a fast browser. Of all the browsers currently available for the Windows platform, nothing can touch Chrome’s speed. But it gets a little long in the tooth when you put in search words in the omnibox and Google insists they know better than you and serve up results in your very own language.

You can always go to www.google.com/ncr but typing in the search engine’s address to go there sort of defeats the objective for the omnibox in the first place.

Instead, you can go directly to your browser’s search engines settings. Open up the Options page by clicking on the wrench icon on the upper right, then click Options. Go to Basics, then scroll down to Search section. Click on the button that says “Manage search engines…”

Add a new entry under “Other search engines.” You can use any description for the first field; use google.com for the second; and finally, and this is important, use http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s for the third field. Press enter to add the entry. Now hover your mouse to your newly-created entry and you’ll see the words “Make default” at the far right. Click on it to make it official.

As a Windows user from the start, there are times I find it lacking. Back in the day, power toys added some of the missing functionalities. Sometimes, you simply had to find an alternative. A tweak there, a utility app here. So here’s a shortlist of programs I find useful in my daily computing:

Every now and then you may find yourself hunting down the file system for a file. If you know part of the filename, you’re better off using the Everything search utility. It’s a small and lightweight program that indexes all of the files in your local drives. Indexing is blazingly fast, you’ll wonder how the hell Windows isn’t able to do it in a similar way.

It only allows for searches using filenames, but I’ve been using it more than I do Windows’ own Search feature. It does need administrative privileges to create its database, so if you don’t have them, you won’t be able to use it.

I’ve discovered this utility searching for ways to unclog my XP workstation at my previous work. It provides an easy way to clean out gunk, find registry errors, and disable those stubborn startup programs among other things.

This one also needs you to have admin privileges. If you have to ask why, you probably shouldn’t be using it anyway.

If you ever wanted to watch digital copies of movies on your laptop, you’d have a hard time searching for a better player that can playback most formats. VLC Media Player handles all popular formats, including MKVs. You can have it play your music collection, too, if you like. But I prefer to have a different player to handle my music files.

Want a program to manage all your social network accounts? TweetDeck lets you do just that, be it Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Buzz, or FourSquare. You can even add all of them if you can’t live without your social connections.

This program lets you mount CD or DVD images and they will appear like physical drives on your PC. It supports popular image formats like ISO and BIN, and you can have up to 8 virtual drives. Very easy to use, too!

…ooOoo…

All of the programs above are free to use. Some accept donations, if you are so inclined.

Google+ is getting all the buzz right now. Probably why FB is hastily deploying this new Chat “improvement” suckerberg has been peddling around.

And when FB is improving something, you betcha it would violate its users’ privacy. And again, there’s no way to permanently turn it off!

When you log in to your FB account, you’ll notice a chat bar docked to the right of the page, asking you to try the new Chat.

It won’t go away until you click on it. And since it’s tricked you to click on it (what else can you do?), you’ll find you’re signed in to Chat. You can make yourself unavailable to chat, even hide the blasted chat bar, but I have the sneaking suspicion everyone can still see you’re online. They just can’t directly open a chat session with you. Oh, and those settings don’t stick. The next time you log in (or close and open your browser if you’re set to always remain logged in), you’ll have to do the entire exercise in futility all over again!

They were hacked in a series of privacy vulnerability exploits these past months and have only re-upped some of their online services recently. Now they’re announcing another draconian DRM method, the PSN Pass.

New games retail for ~$60. A little too steep for most games where you play and beat the game in a matter of hours. After replaying the game several iterations, you may then decide you’d have enough and you can just sell it. The next person will be able to enjoy (loose term here) the game for a lot less. So all’s well.

But not for the game publishers. They don’t get to profit when you resell your used games. And they really believe they should. Typical greed.

So now Sony’s gonna introduce this PSN Pass. Here, a one-save game feature will be applied to a game title. What this means is that there is only one saved game. No matter who uses it. You can’t start over fresh. You’ll be stuck with your saved game data forever. No joy for secondhand users since they can’t start the game with a clean slate.

Capcom recently announced they’re applying the one-save game feature to “Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D.” Now I love the RE series, and would gladly buy the game once its out. But this latest development gives me pause. I’ve had the PC version of RE5, and though I’ve beaten it a thousand times, I still play it ‘cause I can start over. I hope gamers will be well-informed and not support this. It’s just plain wrong.

With Sony adopting this strategy, I wonder if they won’t catch the ire of the hacking community once more and have their online services brought down? Me think Sony’s a little insane in the membrane!